Book description
Break the Old, Waterfall Habits that Hinder Agile Success:
Drive Rapid Value and Continuous Improvement
When agile teams don’t get immediate results, it’s tempting for them to fall back into old habits that make success even less likely. In Being Agile, Leslie Ekas and Scott Will present eleven powerful techniques for rapidly gaining substantial value from agile, making agile methods stick, and launching a “virtuous circle” of continuous improvement.
Drawing on their experience helping more than 100 teams transition to agile, the authors review its key principles, identify corresponding practices, and offer breakthrough approaches for implementing them. Using their techniques, you can break typical waterfall patterns and go beyond merely “doing agile” to actually thinking and being agile.
Ekas and Will help you clear away silos, improve stakeholder interaction, eliminate waste and waterfall-style inefficiencies, and lead the agile transition far more successfully. Each of their eleven principles can stand on its own: when you combine them, they become even more valuable.
Coverage includes
Building “whole teams” that cut across silos and work together throughout a product’s lifecycle
Engaging product stakeholders earlier and far more effectively
Overcoming inefficient “waterations” and “big batch” waterfall thinking
Getting past the curse of multi-tasking
Eliminating dangerous technical and project debt
Repeatedly deploying “release-ready” software in real user environments
Delivering what customers really need, not what you think they needn Fixing the root causes of problems so they don’t recur
Learning from experience: mastering continuous improvement
Assessing whether you’re just “doing agile” or actually “being agile”
Being Agile will be indispensable for all software professionals now adopting agile; for coaches, managers, engineers, and team members who want to get more value from it and for students discovering it for the first time.
Table of contents
- About This eBook
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- About the Authors
- Introduction
- Chapter 1. Whole Teams
-
Chapter 2. Active Stakeholder Interaction
- Principles
-
Practices
- Identifying Stakeholders
- Review Epics with Stakeholders
- Set Expectations
- Stakeholders Should Have Skin in the Game
- Make Stakeholder Interaction Compelling for Your Customers
- Doing Regular Demonstrations
- Reacting to Feedback Received
- When Is the Development Organization a Stakeholder?
- Customer Support Teams as Stakeholders
- Working with Customers in Countries Other Than Your Own
- Metrics
- Breakthrough
- Summary
- Chapter 3. Queuing Theory
- Chapter 4. No Multitasking
- Chapter 5. Eliminate Waste
- Chapter 6. Working Software
- Chapter 7. Deliver Value
- Chapter 8. Release Often
- Chapter 9. Stop the Line
- Chapter 10. Agile Leadership
-
Chapter 11. Continuous Improvement
-
Principles
- Why Is Continuous Improvement Important?
- Why Is Continuous Improvement Hard?
- There Is No Such Thing as “100 Percent Agile”
- Realize That You Will Learn New Things as a Project Progresses
- You Need to Set Time Aside to Sharpen Your Axe
- Focus on Small, On-Going Improvements
- Learn from Your Mistakes; Don’t Make Them Again
- Fail Fast
- Management Needs to Actively Promote Innovation
- Practices
- Metrics
- Breakthrough
- Summary
-
Principles
- Appendix
- Index
Product information
- Title: Being Agile: Eleven Breakthrough Techniques to Keep You from “Waterfalling Backward”
- Author(s):
- Release date: October 2013
- Publisher(s): IBM Press
- ISBN: 9780133375640
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